Play Elden Ring Early On Xbox By Changing Your Region, You Dastardly Dog

From Software's hugely anticipated RPG Elden Ring launches on Friday, February 25, but you may not need to wait until then to start playing, if you have an Xbox and are willing to potentially bend some rules.

It is already February 25 in some parts of the world, so changing your Xbox region to, say, New Zealand or Australia, will allow you to start playing Elden Ring right now. This also requires a digital copy of the game.

To change your region on Xbox, you'll need to navigate to the Language & Location section of the settings menu and then select Language Region to choose a different place.

It bears mentioning that this is not an officially sanctioned Xbox feature, though it has been demonstrated to work with previous games. People have reported that doing this could lead to action being taken against their accounts, though your mileage may vary.

Elden Ring officially launches at midnight local time on February 25, except on PC, where it arrives at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET today, February 24. If you haven't already, pre-loading is now available on all platforms, which should help you jump right into the game as soon as possible upon release (officially or otherwise).

GameSpot's Elden Ring review-in-progress scored the game a rare 10/10, while other critics from across the internet praised the game as well.

"In a genre that has become wrought with bloated and over-designed games, Elden Ring is defiantly contrarian in almost every way," reviewer Tamoor Hussain wrote. "Its commitment to design by subtraction and to placing the responsibility of charting a path through its world entirely on the player makes it stand head and shoulders above other open-world titles. Elden Ring takes the shards of what came before and forges them into something that will go down in history as one of the all-time greats: a triumph in design and creativity, and an open-world game that distinguishes itself for what it doesn't do as much as what it does."

Keep checking back for much more on Elden Ring tomorrow when the game officially releases and beyond.